Sign up for our Daily Newsletter and never miss a story.

Q: Hey Tom — I like your style. You’ve helped clear up so many of the false stories out there about Social Security. And I realized I might have been spreading one of them!

I’ve complained for years about members of Congress excluding themselves from Social Security and setting up cushy retirement plans like none other. But one of my friends told me I was wrong. Then we got to talking about other groups not covered by Social Security, like railroad workers. I want you to set the record straight. Can you print a list of all the groups of employees in this country who are not covered by Social Security?

A: You’ll learn in a minute why I can’t give you such a list. But I can tell you now that your friend is right: Members of Congress aren’t on it. They do pay into Social Security. Here’s the story about how Social Security coverage has changed over the years.

When Social Security was born in the 1930s, most people in this country didn’t have pension plans, and a government program like Social Security was necessary for them. So just about everyone who worked for wages was covered by Social Security from day one. (Self-employed people came under Social Security’s umbrella a decade or so later.)

But some groups of employees already had pension plans in place. The two largest were railroad workers, who were covered by the railroad retirement system, and federal government employees (including members of Congress), who were covered by the civil service retirement system. Both of those pension plans had been around long before Social Security started. So it was decided to exclude these two large groups from Social Security.

In addition, Congress felt that it would be unconstitutional to force a federal government pension plan — Social Security — on state and local governments. So employees of state and local government entities were given the option of joining Social Security. Most did. About 80 percent of all such public employees became part of Social Security.

So that’s what happened when Social Security started in the 1930s. Nobody thought twice about any of these decisions, because they made sense.

But then, over the years, people started griping about the fact that members of Congress and other high-level government officials were not covered by Social Security. Just as silly and false Web rumors about Social Security exist today, stories began to circulate in the pre-Internet world that Congress had specifically excluded itself from Social Security in order to set its members up with a nice “Cadillac retirement plan.” Eventually, simply too much political pressure came to bear on Congress for it to remain outside of Social Security.

So in 1983, as part of a package of major Social Security-reform legislation, Congress passed a law mandating that all of its members, the president and vice president, all other high-level government leaders, and all federal employees hired after 1983 would be covered by Social Security.

Today, that leaves railroad workers as the only major nationwide group of employees still not covered by Social Security.

You asked for a list of other groups not covered. But that would be almost impossible. There are thousands of them. All are various state and local employee groups around the country (again, about 20 percent of the total). Those groups could be anything from a small sewer district of maybe 10 employees to a large group of thousands of employees, such as teachers. In fact, the largest groups of non-Social Security covered workers tend to be teachers — in states like California, Texas and Ohio. Also, many law enforcement agencies in these same (and some other) states are not covered by Social Security.

Today, around the country as a whole, about 93 percent of workers are covered by Social Security.

People still gripe about members of Congress and their pensions. They do get a pension that supplements their Social Security. But that’s the way the system is supposed to work.

For example, my wife was a county librarian in a state that was covered by Social Security. She gets Social Security, and she gets a pension from the county where she worked to supplement it. My neighbor worked for a large, national corporation. He gets Social Security, and he collects a nice pension from his former employer to supplement it. But as we all know, most company pensions are getting to be a thing of the past, replaced — if they are replaced at all — by 401(k) plans. That’s not the way things were supposed to work — but it’s the way this country’s retirement systems have evolved.

And one final point: As part of any upcoming reforms to Social Security, one commonly discussed proposal is what’s called “universal coverage.” That essentially means everyone in the country would be covered by Social Security. It’s an easy political fix, because it impacts only a relatively small group of people (the 7 percent of the population not covered by Social Security). But folks who work for state and local government agencies not participating in Social Security are worried that they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into the federal pension system.

To ease their minds a bit, I would wager that any push for universal coverage will impact only newly hired employees.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Know First.

The stories you want. The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning.

With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<!-- NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_2 -->
<ins class="adsbygoogle NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_2" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8573325940152694" data-ad-slot="NationalMemo\/NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_2" style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<!-- NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_3 -->
<ins class="adsbygoogle NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_3" data-ad-client="ca-pub-8573325940152694" data-ad-slot="NationalMemo\/NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_3" style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>